Utilizing Pileup Effect and Intermittently Nonlinear Filtering in Synthesis of Covert and Hard-to-Intercept Communication Links

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel physical-layer steganography method that uses the pileup effect and intermittently nonlinear filtering to create covert, hard-to-intercept communication links by blending signals with channel noise and obfuscating their spectral and temporal features.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach combining pileup effect and nonlinear filtering to enhance covert communication and signal separation in noisy channels.

Findings

Stego messages can be made statistically indistinguishable from channel noise.

Spectral and temporal properties of signals can be matched to noise for obfuscation.

Effective separation of signals is possible using combined linear and nonlinear filtering techniques.

Abstract

We outline an approach to physical-layer steganography where the transmitted low-power stego messages are statistically indistinguishable from the Gaussian component of the channel noise (e.g. the thermal noise) observed in the same spectral band, and thus the channel noise itself serves as an effective cover signal. We also demonstrate how the apparent spectral and temporal properties of transmitted additional, higher-power cover signals (including those using the existing communication protocols) can be made to match those of the low-power stego payload and the Gaussian noise, providing extra layers of obfuscation for both the cover and the stego messages. We further illustrate how a specific combination of linear and nonlinear filtering can be used for effective separation of the cover, payload, and/or "friendly jamming" signals even when all transmissions have essentially the same spectral characteristics as well as temporal and amplitude structures, and when there are no explicit differences in the spectral and/or temporal allocations for the cover and the stego messages.